Travels and safaris

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Today was the day that I realised that there is next to no point in writing this blog. When a day starts with the sun coming up over the Indian ocean, watched from your hotel's private jetty, and finishes with a great home-cooked keralan meal, complete with chilled Kingfisher, and followed by a night safari in the foothills of the Western Ghats - when that happens, you know that you can't describe half of what happened, or even begin to explain how it felt or sounded or smelt, even.

The drive up from Kochi to the Wayanad nature reserve was dull at first, apart from some first rate Indian driving. Bad enough to mean that I stopped watching the road and resorted to watching the endless scrubby strip towns that sprawled along the road side.

As we got further north, though, it all started changing. Far more Muslim - green flags, green bunting, IUML (Indian United Muslim League?) flags, and mosque after mosque after mosque. Made a change from mozzie after mozzie after mozzie, at least.

Then we hit the hills, which was breathtaking. Firstly because of the skills of our driver - the most aggressive man to ever take hold of a steering wheel, and so extravangantly skilled in horn usage that he surely has a future in an orchestra. He had dozens of different messages that he could get across, and if the horn failed, then the default option seemed to be to overtake anyway. Or undertake. All much of a muchness, really.

The driver wasn't only notable for his driving, though. He was an absolutely charming man - not great english, but took total delight in showing us the best of the country - stopping at the best view points, pulling over when he saw monkeys in a tree by the side of the road, explaining what was growing. He even found us a tea plantation, and had us stand between tea bushes while he took a photo of us.

As we got higher, we hit the coffee plantations. I never realised how amazing they smelt. Really thick, heavy scent - something like jasmine, but different. All this as part of a seven hour drive that I'd absolutely dreaded. I'm starting to realised that even chores become a pleasure when you're in India.

When we finally arrived, we were shown to our room in a three bed bungalow, in the middle of nowhere (no shops within an hour and a half's walk). Although we were met by our host, Venu (much, much more of him later), who also introduced us to his outrageously cute three year old grand daughter, and who then proceeded to serve up a full meal within ten minutes of us arriving, I've got to admit that we felt a little... abandoned. No way of getting out, Venu had disappeared, only explaining that he would be back in two hours for the evening safari. A bit challenging, really. So we lay back, had a nap in the sun (beautiful climate up in the hills - like the most perfect English summer afternoon that you could ever imagine), and waited.

We were sharing the place with one other person, who arrived in due course. A proper old-school Aussie, 64 and trekking around India on his own. Then it was safari time. The three of us were loaded into a jeep, and we headed off into the nature reserve. To be honest, if we'd seen nothing it would still have been stunning. Teak plantations, and bamboo clumps that looked like something out of jurassic Park, and must have been 50 or 60 foot high. And the cleanest air you could possibly imagine, again like the perfect English evening, with that musty, woody smell when you're walking through a forest.

That we saw plenty of kingfishers (outrageously beautiful birds), three different types of deer, bison, huge squirrels, monkeys, jungle chickens (just as stupid as normal chickens) and - best of all - a family of elephants, complete with a few babies, was just a bonus. And all in the company of some of the smiliest guides you could ask for. Their English was terrible (but then so is my Mallayam) but the enthusiasm more than made up for it.

So not a bad day, really. And made even better by the sheer unplannedness of it all - it was only a couple of days before that me and Fi had decided to book the trip up to the hills. Turns out that it was one of the best possible decisions we could have made.

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